How to put together social media brand guidelines

A brand’s identity can come apart quickly on social media. The reason is obvious once you say it: social media wants new content every day, and that content is often made by different people, with different tools, in a hurry. Brand guidelines cover the logo and the colours, but they rarely say how to build a story frame or where the logo goes on a post. Social media guidelines fill that gap.

What goes in them

Formats. Sizes for posts, stories and carousels, and the safe areas text mustn’t enter.

Logo use. Where the logo sits on a post, at what size and in which colour.

Type rules. Which typeface and weight for headlines and text, and how many lines of text a single frame can take.

Colour and photography. Which backgrounds to use, what the photos should feel like, and what happens when text sits on a photo.

Templates. Ready-made layouts for the kinds of content you post most.

Example: Taze Sepet

Taze Sepet’s guidelines give social media two separate sections, one for posts and one for stories.

For posts the core rule is short: the photo leads, the logo signs. The logo appears as a white emblem in the corner, or as a centred white logo for brand moments. The measurements are written down too. The corner emblem is inset 6% from the edges and sits at 110 to 120 px on a 1080 px canvas. Photos with a centred logo get a Forest-tone overlay of 35 to 40%. Posts are 1080 × 1350 px, and headlines run to two lines at most.

Stories combine a vertical photo, a short headline and a single call to action. No text goes into the 250 px safe zones at the top and bottom. The call to action is one rounded button, in cream or Fresh Green. Highlights get their own icons too: cream line icons on Forest.

Example: Rare Creative

Rare Creative is a creative agency. It needed an identity that would stay consistent across its own digital and printed work. After the logo, the typography and a green and navy palette, we turned all of that into social media guidelines and templates for the feed, stories and carousels.

An agency’s own account is a shop window for how consistent it can be. The templates aren’t there to limit creativity. They’re there so every new post stays inside the same identity.

A few rules from our own account

We have written rules for Kischla’s Instagram too. Some of them:

• We plan the grid in rows of three. Side by side, the first three posts on our profile form our K, and that only holds while posts keep coming in multiples of three.
• On carousels, our handle goes on the last slide only, not on every slide.
• We don’t write cards in capitals. Every card is in sentence case.
• There’s one accent colour, red, used once per frame.

Small rules, but for someone making content every day they take a lot of decisions off the table.

Questions to ask as you put them together

• What kinds of content will the account post most? Build templates for those first.
• Who will make the content, and with which tools?
• What happens when there’s no photo? How does a text-only frame work?
• Does the logo need to be on every frame, or is the profile row enough?

Social media guidelines and templates are part of our social media management service. You can see Rare Creative’s identity on its case page.